Action sports may involve extreme motions with high speed, acceleration, and extreme forces. When actions take place at different time or at different locations, it can be difficult to objectively compare the achievements of different participants.
A wide spread of microprocessors, inertial sensors and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices allows to accurately measure such motions, quantifying them in term of speed, acceleration, air time, rotation, flip, etc., and then compare these data independent on where and when the action was performed.
There are multiple systems that address such measurements. However, existing systems typically use a single wearable device which combines sensors, GPS receiver, memory and processing power sufficient to perform sensor measurement and computation of the performance characteristics. In some cases, results are wirelessly sent to a remote location for storage and display.
Such systems have some significant limitations. For example, due to the fast and complicated nature of the action sport motion, the computational and algorithmic complexity in the determination of the performance characteristics can be very significant. In addition, to compare performance between different sportsmen, different venues, and different time, the performance data is stored in a common searchable database. A common way used in the existing systems is to transfer data to a database is based on a wireless communication which farther increases complexity and cost of the wearable device.
Further, due to the nature of the action sports, such as high altitude mountain ski, wake boarding, windsurfing, etc., it is desirable that the devices used to collect data are very rugged and highly reliable, which is difficult to achieve in a highly complicated, multi-function wearable device.
Further, very often there is no reliable high speed data connection at the locations where the action sports are performed to facilitate the transfer of data to the common searchable database.